14 of the world's 15 ‘oldest’ countries (largest percentage of people age 65 plus) are to be found in Europe. While E-Government is currently establishing as the most important public sector reform strategy in the EU (Lisbon Agenda), age is a factor which strongly affects EGovernment usage. Under the label of ‘E-Inclusion’ EU policies seeks to solve also age-related digital divide issues. This ...

This paper presents a system for real-time, open-domain question answering on the Web of documents written in Portuguese, prepared to handle factual questions and available as a freely accessible online service. In order to deliver candidate answers to input questions phrased in Portuguese, this system resorts to a number of shallow processing tools and question answering techniques that are sp...

Testing is the process of stimulating a system with inputs in order to reveal hidden parts of the system state. We consider a variant of the testing problem that was put forward in the model-based diagnosis literature, and consists of finding input patterns that definitely discriminate between different constraint-based system models. We show that this problem can be framed as a game played bet...

Service provider applications, for example in the form of Software-as-a-Service are different from traditional enterprise software systems because they need to enable serving multiple customers at a time with a shared infrastructure. While the property of multi-tenancy refers to the isolation of different customers on a shared system, multi-customer support enables a service provider to add val...

The new communication and information systems have significantly increased the possibilities offered to professional companies for developing and maintaining long-term customer relationships. However, technology alone cannot ensure the success of CRM strategies. The implementation of a customer-centred culture, shared by the entire professional organisation, requires the combination of human re...

Customer loyalty is a key driver of financial performance in service organizations. We investigate whether or not online customer loyalty can be increased through enhancing the perceived service quality, reducing perceived sacrifice and improving the perceived service outcome in the online service context with the possible availability of live help service technology. We also investigate the mo...

Migration of legacy software to service-based systems is an increasingly important problem area. So far, many SOA migration approaches have been proposed in both industry and academia. There is, however, considerable difference between SOA migration approaches defined in academia and those emerged in industry. This difference pinpoints a potential gap between theory and practice. To bridge this...

Following decades of stability and comfortable margins, utility companies today face strong pressure from regulatory bodies and competitors. As a response to the market dynamics, many have initiated a transformation from a “provider” to a service company, yet realize that their customer insights that would be necessary to successfully develop and market new services are sparse. We argue that th...

Mobile portals have become a common entry point to the mobile Internet, and take a number of forms. They may be service provider portals, such as Vodafone’s Live! portal (Vodafone, 2006), offering access to both in-house and brokered external services. Alternatively, they may be public pure play sites that provide some kind of managed access to resources using a yellowpages approach. Good examp...